When the Cranks Rule

Although accusations of persecution are rife in pseudoscience, ironically, it is much
more common for pseudoscientists to persecute orthodox scientists whenever the
pseudoscientists gain the upper hand. Consider these remarks by John C.Campbell on the use
of dowsing rods to locate Viet Cong tunnels in Vietnam (on the efficacy of the method, the
necessary and sufficient comment is that we lost the war. More specifically, we lost the
battle for the tunnels. Surely Marines with welding rods could be expected to find tunnels
faster than the Viet Cong could dig them).

For the first time in human history, there now exists a situation in which the
disciplined thinking techniques, and precision-observing techniques of modern science will
be applied in a positive sense to the problem of a subjective phenomenon.
"Positive" in that the research men will be commanded, ordered, and damn well
required to stop using their talents to prove it isn't so, because their theories hold it
impossible, and find out why it is so, because it works. Those scientists who are
personally psychologically so oriented that they simply can't accept that notion will be
simply brushed aside, and men who can and will see what's happening on their own campuses,
and will sincerely try to understand this new order of phenomenon will be installed.

To put it bluntly, science will be ordered to arrive at a preordained conclusion
(dowsing works), and any scientists who have the temerity to insist that the Emperor has
no clothes will simply be purged. Campbell seems to savor the thought.

Cranks in the Soviet Union

It actually did happen in the Soviet Union, where a crank biologist, Trofim Lysenko,
linked his evolutionary theories to Marxist ideology and became a good friend of Stalin.
With connections like that, Lysenko simply purged his opponents to Siberia or worse. Not
content with nearly wrecking genetics in the Soviet Union, Marxist ideologues attacked
quantum mechanics in the late 1940's.

Cranks in Nazi Germany

In Nazi Germany, a pseudoscience of "Aryan physics" was developed to
replace relativity, many of whose developers were Jewish. The World Ice or Glacial
Cosmogony cult was active in Germany in the 1930's. This cult believed that the planets,
except Earth, were deeply covered with ice, that the Milky Way was made of gigantic ice
blocks instead of stars (photographs showing the Milky Way to be made of stars
were faked), and so on. They linked their beliefs to Nazi ideology, harassed
orthodox astronomers, disrupted scientific meetings, and seem to have had ambitions of
becoming the science arm of the Nazi Party. The Nazis managed to check that impulse. It is
hard to find favorable things to say about the Nazis, but at least once they served the
truth.

It's a good thing the Welt-Eis Lehre is largely forgotten, otherwise,
like Velikovsky's followers, we'd have believers touting images of ice-covered
moons in the outer solar system as proof of their theory. They'd ignore
embarrassments like moon rocks (or claim the samples were faked). It would be
interesting to see these people go up against Velikovsky followers over the
question of whether Venus is covered with ice.

An American Example

For those who think it can't happen here, some sobering news. It has happened
here. Before Laetrile became the great crank cancer hope in the 1970's, the ultimate
cancer cure was Krebiozen, or "K". Originally developed by two Yugoslavs, Stevan
and Marko Durovic in the late 1940's, Krebiozen caught the fancy of Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, a
physiologist and vice-president of the University of Illinois. The president of the
university, George C. Stoddard, ordered Ivy not to use Krebiozen in university clinics
until he and the Durovics produced samples for analysis. They refused. Ivy found support
among the trustees, who included former football great Red Grange, and had Stoddard fired
in 1954. Health faddists have the unbelievable audacity to cast Ivy in the role
of persecuted martyr in this episode.

In the 1980's, creationists attempted to have creation decreed to be the scientific
equal of evolution by law. Having failed in the courts, they have retreated to the grass
roots, attempting to gain control over local school boards. Doubtless teachers who refuse
to conform, should the creationists succeed, will be disciplined. After the Scopes Trial
of 1925, evolution almost vanished from American biology texts for three decades, and even
now the creationist movement has caused publishers to soften or delete statements on
evolution for fear of losing the approval of local Boards of Education. Until fairly
recently, to take another example, students in some universities in the southern U.S. were
expected to answer that blacks were inferior to whites on biology and psychology exams.
Cases of pseudoscience attaining real power are rare, yet in nearly every case the
pseudoscientists have launched a genuine persecution of orthodox science. But the worst is
yet to be told.

The Church of Scientology, an outgrowth of L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics cult of the
Fifties, became one of the most controversial of American religious cults. When, in 1977,
Federal agents raided the cult's offices because, among other things, the cult had
infiltrated Federal agencies and stolen Government documents related to investigations of
the cult, public reaction was amusement as much as anything else. After all, the feds are
big boys and can take care of themselves, and it was fun to see the tables turned and the
Government being under surveillance. But there's another side to the story. One of the
files seized was entitled "P.C. Freakout" and referred to "getting P.C.
incarcerated in a mental institution or in jail".

"P.C." was Paulette
Cooper, and her crime was writing a book in 1971 called The Scandal of Scientology.
She and her publisher were sued and forced to halt publication. Cooper was compelled, as
part of the settlement, to sign a statement that 52 passages in her book were false or
misleading, and to agree not to publish the book elsewhere. One wonders where the
defenders of Worlds in Collision and other crank works were while this was going
on, or what opponents of tort reform have to say about it. In November, 1972, a Scientology member, masquerading as a donation collector, entered
her apartment and stole some of her personal stationery, which was then used to send a
fake bomb threat. Cooper was indicted by a Federal grand jury, but after she
passed a sodium pentathol examination, the Government dropped the investigation. Not until 1977 did the
raid on Scientology headquarters uncover evidence that exonerated Cooper. The Church of
Scientology regularly used the threat of costly libel suits to silence critics, and the
tactic of using libel suits to silence criticism or even critical examination of
controversial topics is becoming perilously common in many areas of American society.

Let's junk once and for all the myth of the "persecuted genius." These
"persecuted geniuses" usually treat their "oppressors" with far worse
malice than they, themselves, are treated. It's remarkable that the single most bizarre
conspiracy in this whole discussion was a real rather than imaginary plot, and it was
hatched by a pseudoscience cult.

Incidentally, Hubbard's early science fiction works are now regularly published in
anthologies along with the works of respected science fiction authors, and his novel Battlefield
Earth became a major motion picture in 2000. Shamefully, nobody in the
science-fiction fraternity has protested this prostitution of science fiction.
Nothing gratified me more than to see Battlefield
Earth crash and burn. I didn't want it merely to fail; I wanted it to go
down in film history along with Ishtar, Showgirls, and Myra
Breckenridge. And it did.